ozdelver - has your cousin uploaded to other sites? Initially FamilyTreeDNA was the only company that was taking tests from Australians, so there's a chance that there's matches there who've not tested at Ancestry. It's well worth uploading to MyHeritage as well.

The brother of one of my ancestors also had a daughter born 'in uncleaness' in Peterhead in 1846. I think this was how the Minister at the time liked to record the baptisms of children whose parents weren't married.

To be frank, I'd trust Genetic Affairs to just run the matching and produce the table and not share the match list more than I would trust some of my matches to not go sharing a mutual match list somewhere they shouldn't.

Well if it is not accessing data at the chromosome level and making matches there it is much less useful than matching at say Gedmatch, ftdna or MyHeritage all of which have chromosome browsers and if that is the case then why use Genetic Affairs at all ?

I agree that it's a lot less useful than matching at a site with a chromosome browser.

But most matches at Ancestry never upload anywhere else so this is a way of speeding up the process of finding which of your matches share 20cM or more with your other matches. This info is already available if you want to go through hundreds of pages match by match.

I don't think that is the full picture though. The fuller picture is that they are matching specific matches on specific chromosomes to specific people i.e. going into greater detail that can only be achieved by accessing the underlying data to some extent (sorry if I have not explained that very well).

We don't know that though.

I think it just goes through all of your mutual matches at whichever site and takes note of who matches whom, which is the same information that any of us can access at Ancestry. It doesn't need to access that at a chromosome level.

I wouldn't take any of these remarks to heart PharmaT. I get the impression that sometimes you do though, and are easily hurt by thoughtless, ignorant and/or downright mean comments. Please don't let these remarks put you off.

My other half is an academic and spends a lot of his weekends writing and reviewing papers. Our children have concluded that they don't want to do what he does when they grow up because "he spends a lot of time swearing at the computer". They don't get to see the lab work, which can also be frustrating and the bureaucracy is extremely frustrating as well.

He thinks there's considerable crossover between academic research and genealogy in terms of the processes.

I recently gave a presentation at a family gathering of some of the maternal lines. I didn't have primary sources (as in ....seen the ACTUAL document in person and not a transcript) and much of it was reliant on secondary sources. One of these branches is recorded in Burkes etc and going back that far it would be difficult to confirm anything. It was so long since I'd used PowerPoint that the process of making each slide was taking forever, but you can imagine my dismay when at about midnight I found that the various sources weren't in agreement. I'd never noticed before.

A couple of hours later, after looking at various records in the index at NRS and a few sites that focus on Scottish genealogy I came to the conclusion that the tree at Stirnet had the best supporting evidence, as it also explained how the conclusions were reached. Then I managed to complete a couple more slides before going to bed at about 3am.

As you can imagine I wasn't looking very perky the following morning. I was telling DH how it had been going just fine (apart from struggling to make slides that didn't appear to have been constructed by a pre-schooler) but then I'd realised that some of the sources didn't agree. He laughed and said "welcome to academia".

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